Holocaust-denial thrives on contradiction. Because it has no thesis
of its own, striving merely to cast doubt upon the status quo, it is
replete with anecdotes about trivial details which supposedly prove
that someone is lying. Or just that something fishy is going on. These
details can never be simple mistakes, but must invariably be part of a
vast web of deceit; thus, any error in a document exposes that entire
document as a forgery or a pack of lies.

Such is the case for the testimony of Rudolf Höß.

Höß (also spelled "Hoess") has long been attacked by
deniers as totally untrustworthy. One of their most enduring claims has
been based on his referencing the Operation Reinhard camps by the names
of Belzec, Treblinka, and Wolzek. To be precise, his
statement
included this comment:

The "final solution" of the Jewish question meant the complete
extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish
extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time,
there were already in the General Government three other extermination
camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek.
[1]

There are two errors in the above quote. The first is the date:
Höß said 1941 when he meant 1942.
[2]

The second error is that the last camp named, "Wolzek," does not
exist, and never existed. And from this apparent contradiction, deniers
rush to conclusions. The conclusion they prefer is that Höß
was tortured, and that his whole confession, and his testimony, indeed
everything Höß ever said or wrote, is wrong.

The Institute for Historical Review concludes:

[Hoess' confession] is actually a false statement that was obtained
by torture. [...]

The Höss "affidavit" further alleges that Jews were already being
exterminated by gas in the summer of 1941 at three other camps: Belzec,
Treblinka and Wolzek. The "Wolzek" camp mentioned by Höss is a
total invention. No such camp existed, and the name is no longer
mentioned in Holocaust literature.
[3]

Ernst Zundel's "Zundelsite" claims:

It is common knowledge that Hoess was severely tortured in order to
obtain his "confession" and to make him write his
"memoirs".
I have
discussed this elsewhere. As a result of the torture, Hoess came up
with amazing details, such as a nonexistent camp "Wolzek", as well as
other things which could not have possibly been taking place.
[4]

David Irving makes the camp the subject of a pointed question in a
letter to noted historian Robert-Jan Van Pelt:

What incidentally is your authority for confidently equating
Höss's mysterious location "Wolzek" with "[Sobibor]" (page 279);
as you know, Höss's "Wolzek" has long intrigued revisionists.
[5]

We shall return to the Sobibor explanation in a moment.

Most outlandish of all is the claim of the denier Robert Faurisson.
To even understand Faurisson's accusation, we must take a moment to
examine Höß's situation in a little more detail.

Höß went into hiding and was discovered only in
1946. He was not tried at Nuremberg, but rather called to testify
as a witness (for the defense, as it happened). His mention of the
supposed "Wolzek" camp came during the Nuremberg process.

Later, Höß was himself tried, was convicted, and was
sentenced to be hanged. As he sat in a Polish cell waiting for
that sentence to be carried out, he wrote his
memoirs.
Those
memoirs contain confirmation of all the essential facts of his
previous confession, interrogation, and testimony at Nuremberg.
Furthermore, they are written in a frank and open manner which was
clearly not the result of coercion. For example, he
insults Poles and Ukrainians, and complains that he was beaten
at his arrest prior to being incarcerated at Nuremberg.

Faurisson's explanation of the revealing memoirs is that
Höß was allowed to write honestly about being beaten during
his earlier confinement - but for a surprising reason:

In his memoirs Hoess recounts the circumstances of his arrest and what
followed. The treatment that he underwent was particularly brutal. At
first sight it is surprising that the Poles allowed Hoess to make the
revelations he did about the British military police. On reflection, we
discover that they might have done so out of one or more of the
following motives:

[...]

to furnish an explanation for certain absurdities contained in the
text (NO-1210) that the British police had had Hoess sign, one of these
absurdities being the invention of an "extermination camp" in a place
which never existed on any Polish map: "Wolzek near Lublin"; confusion
with Belzec is not possible since Hoess talks about three camps:
"Belzek (sic), Tublinka (sic) and Wolzek near Lublin."
[6]

In Faurisson's view, it is entirely possible that Höß was
allowed, maybe encouraged
[7]
to write about his rough treatment - but not out of charity or respect
for truth. Rather, the conspirators who engineered the hoax of the
Holocaust knew that his accusations would allow future historians
to explain away the Wolzek contradiction!

Fortunately, an explanation that requires much less mental
contortion is readily available. Not only was Höß not
tortured into inventing "Wolzek" and then forced to write about that
torture to unvex future historians, Höß was not tortured
into inventing "Wolzek" in the first place. Because "Wolzek" is not an
invention.

And all one has to do is look at a map.

Before Höß gave his statement to the court, quoted
above,
he was interrogated at length, over two days. The transcript of those
interrogations is published in The Holocaust: Selected Documents
in Eighteen Volumes, John Mendelson, Ed., 1982, Vol. 12, pp.
56-127.

On p. 75, we see Höß's answers during the interrogation,
which of course took place before his court statement. He was asked:

Q. What were these extermination camps? Where were they, and what
were their names?

His response was - and this is verbatim, including the spelling
mistake of the court reporter:

A. There were three camps: first Treblinka, Belzak near Lemberg and
the third one was 40 kilometers in the direction of Kulm. It was past
Kulm in an easterly direction.

Note that, despite being explicitly asked for the names of all
three, Höß can only come up with two. "Treblinka" is spelled
correctly by the transcriber. "Belzak" is Belzec. The missing camp,
whose name Höß has forgotten, is - as van Pelt has already
pointed out - Sobibor.

Does Sobibor's location fit with the one detail Höß
gives? He claims it is 40 km "past Kulm in an easterly direction." The
town of Chelm (Kulm, in the German spelling) is bisected by a railway
line that runs west toward Lublin and east into the Soviet Union. Forty
kilometers east of Chelm is nothing in particular, or at least no known
death camps.

But he did not say it was due east; he said "in an easterly
direction." Coming out of the town, near the city limits, a railway
splits off and heads northeast. Exactly forty kilometers as
travelled by rail lies the death camp Sobibor:
[8]

Höß, though he forgot the name and later gave the wrong
name, did have an idea of where the third camp was. His directions were
not perfect, but then he was not asked to give directions.

The deniers' explanation is that this made-up camp "Wolzek" was
invented out of nothing, because Höß was simply tortured
into confessing to things which did not exist.

But the paradox is resolved by reading the interrogation transcript
and looking at the map. The camp was there. It was not invented, just
misnamed.

The reader may judge which rival hypothesis best fits the facts:

Höß was inventing details under torture and just
happened to place a fictitious death camp in exactly the same
location as the real, omitted Reinhard death camp, or

he just got its name wrong.

The choice is obvious.

Why do Holocaust-deniers rush to embrace the wrong choice? The
answer is left as an exercise for the reader.

And why did Höß think the camp was named
"Wolzek"? That's a mystery whose answer may never be known. But
considering that his job was to run the Auschwitz camp, three hundred
kilometers away; that the extermination program was always kept under
strictest secrecy; and that the surrounding territory had been
conquered and thus bore names in both his native tongue and Polish: a
misunderstanding is surely not out of the question.

For a humorous example of this, one may turn to the historian Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, whose work in debunking Holocaust-denial is exemplary. He
writes:

Here is an example of a confusion at least as serious as the error
of "Wolzek." A French author, speaking precisely of Hoess, tells us (p.
43) that he was incarcerated at the prison in "Krakau," and on the next
page, places him in "Cracovie." But Krakau is the German name of the
city called Cracovie in French.

It seems that place names in foreign languages are tricky for
anyone. Who has made this error? It happens to be the "grandfather of
revisionism" himself:

It is interesting to note that Höß, in his pretrial
interrogation, first guesses July 1941 for the date (pp. 17-19 in the
interrogation transcript, 72-74 in Mendelsohn op. cit.). Then he
asserts, twice (p. 19/74), that it was before the invasion of the
Soviet Union (June 22, 1941). Shortly thereafter (p. 20/75), he has
Himmler explaining that the existing extermination camps were
overtaxed, though construction on those camps did not begin until
November 1941. His recollection that the invasion had not yet begun
must have been wrong, if for no other reason than the fact that,
pre-invasion, the Soviets occupied those patches of soil. So clearly,
Höß had a poor memory for chronology.

A good chronology of the murder installations in Auschwitz, which
stands primarily on the documentary evidence irrespective of
Höß's recollections, is given in "The Machinery of Mass
Murder at Auschwitz," Jean-Claude Pressac with Robert-Jan van Pelt, in
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael
Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, 1994, pp. 213ff.

Similarly, a good chronology of the Reinhard camps, based on
documentary and testimonial evidence, is in Nazi Mass
Murder, edited by Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert
Rückerl, 1993, pp. 102ff.

Höß was beaten and otherwise treated badly during his
imprisonment at the hands of his British captors. When he was turned
over to the IMT in Nuremberg, by comparison it was - to use his words -
"like staying in a
health spa"
(Hoss, Death Dealer, Paskuly, Ed., 1992, p. 180).
Bizarrely, from this, deniers conclude that his Nuremberg
testimony was extracted by torture.

In any case, it is quite clear that the memoirs were not, in fact,
written under duress. One specific reason is the
death figure
which Höß gives: 1.1 million. This figure was contrary to
all prevailing opinion at the time - and it was right.

Regarding Faurisson's quote of "Wolzek near Lublin," which I have
been unable to verify: if this was indeed something Höß
said, it is consistent with the explanation of Wolzek really being
Sobibor. As Mike Stein has
pointed out,
his interrogation (quoted above), includes a reference to "Belzak
[Belzec] near Lemberg [Lvov]." Belzec is not much "near"er to Lvov than
Sobibor to Lublin: roughly 70 km and 80 km by my measurement.

Faurisson was a witness at the 1988 trial
of Ernst Zundel, where he answered questions about the Hoess memoirs.
Does he believe Höß was forced to write about his
poor treatment at the hands of the British? Here are two denier
versions of this episode, the first from Lenski, Robert, The
Holocaust On Trial, 1990, p. 341:

Pearson asked if Faurisson was calling the autobiography a
"forgery," and the latter replied, "I say that this has been written
under the control of his Polish Communist captors."

The chapter on the gas chambers is "totally preposterous," said
Faurisson.

Pearson: You don't like the chapter on the gas chambers, but you do
like the chapter where he says he was mistreated by the British, so you
accept that?

"No," said Faurisson. "As everything has been done under the control
of the Poles, I am interested by the fact that he said that."

The Hoess autobiography, said Faurisson, had been written under the
control of his Polish Communist captors [...]

Faurisson was interested in the fact that the autobiography, written
under the control of the Poles, alleged that Hoess had been tortured by
the British. But Faurisson emphasized that he did not know whether
Hoess even wrote the autobiography: [...]

The map is scanned from Polska
Rzeczpospolita Ludowa: Mapa administracyjna ("Polish Peoples
Republic: Administrative Map"), produced by the Panstwowe
Przedsiebiorstwo Wydawnictw Kartograficznych ("State Map Publishing
Enterprise") in 1958, H. Cytowski, Editor. This was the most-nearly
contemporaneous map I could find which showed railroads in detail.

For completeness' sake: in my judgement, there is no possibility
that the railway line shown was built between the years 1942 and 1958.
There must have been a wartime railway that delivered condemned people
to Sobibor. There is no northern connection shown (the line dead-ends
near Wlodowa, just north of Sobibor), so the rail line on the map must
have been the one used to transport victims to the camp.

As measured by my ruler and eye, and the map's legend (not scanned),
40 km down the rail line from Sobibor would place the traveller exactly
in the middle of Chelm. The skeptical reader may judge the scale
using any two landmarks, of course.